ShakeSpared: Everything Gets Fixed Forever
by jasonrhode
Summary: Everything is fixed in Shakespeare forever, world without end. Amen.
1. Act I: But by No Means Vulgar

**The below. There's nothing I can do about it now. You have been warned. - THE AUTHOR**

_The Royal Court of Elsinore, Denmark, Some Time Ago, The Afternoon: _

_It is amazing the amount of problems that can be solved by a headbutt. This is not one of those stories. _

_Oh, sure, your family specialized in headbutts and probably have stories about them, the kind that are served at tedious length over the wine, the sort of wine part where you end up drinking the barrel dry and all sorts of exotic spices and the boys that survived last summer's Killdozer fest then have to dodge brass pots thrown at them, and whose fault is it really that one of them took the blow to the head from the censer oh god dad you did it again we don't have enough room in the cellar and why is there an army of starfish at the door with spea-_

_Enough of that. Well, la-di-Dahl. Here's the kind of story this is: _

It was the best of times, it was the coldest of times, Prince Claudius thought. He was wiggling through the snow on his gut, massaging a trail through the cold white like a great terrible bear ... if bears wore the uniform of the Danish court and carried poison in one hand.

"When I get to be King," he said to himself now - he had said to himself many times, "I will abolish this dread winter. By law. With Jesus' help, then there will be naught but summer for all ten months of the year. I will probably need to see a wizard about that, methinks. Also, whomever makes the calendars."

He wasn't an old man, or even a middle-aged man, but his bones were not made for serpent-like movement. If you know what I mean.

He'd rather have done this years later. Like, say, when there wasn't a child prince at court. Whatever else you could say about Claudius, the man had an eye out, you know, for the kids. But the weirdness at the court - these new people - had moved up his timetable from "Kill Brother Later" to "Kill Brother Now."

Bow, stubborn knees, he thought. Be soft as baby sinews. No more belly-crawling soon.

He looked back at the snail's trail he'd carved through the snow. It ran all the way from his corner window apartment on the third floor. That's where he'd hopped on the bare tree branch and climbed down until he could wiggle his way to the patio in the center. On second thought, crawling like that hadn't been necessary but ... Fuck it, I feel like I shine, he thought.

Kings really didn't have to do this sort of business. That was the point to getting the crown.

"And to be seen!" he thought.

Anyway, you could hire people from this. Those people were usually Italians. You got to be king so you could hire Italians and spend your time making war and pastries. And the wenching was in there somewhere too.

Oh, yes. He looked up. Speaking of all things wench-related, there was his brother, Old Hamlet, snoozing like the fat bastard he was. Sitting - well, more splaying out - in the middle of his orchard, his custom always in the afternoon.

Being Denmark, snow covered the ground. How Old Hamlet could sleep so well with the freezing of the world was a mystery to him. It was probably some walrus blood back in the family tree.

_Where the fuck was his neck?_

Claudius had been looking for his brother's neck for years. And sooner would he ferret out a fifth moon of Earth. He had just not been able to find the evidence, any evidence, that it existed. It was like God. People talked about it, were scared of it, it was theoretically possible, but it was all up in the air and -

Oh, really? Really? Claudius shook his head. Bro had a large mutton bone clenched in one meaty paw. His brother the king was probably having one of those wild pack-wrestling dreams he'd loved since birth.

Well, enjoy your dances with wolves, Fatty, he thought.

"The sun no sooner shall the mountains touch," Claudius whispered, "But we will ship him hence."

He got to his feet but stayed in a low crouch. His baboon-like fingers began to unscrew the poison bottle's cork. He loved it when a plan came together.

Out came the cork. Ever so slowly, he stood, and leaning over his brother's prostrate form, tipped the bottle of heberdine venom over the King's smooth milky white flesh. Just a few drops would -

A hand was around his hand, forcing the bottle up. Gloved hand.

_White. Gloved. Leather. _

Oh, shit.

"You're in for a deep Dicking," a voice said.

Claudius looked up to see the source of that voice. Wrapped in snow-white cloth, all in white, was the smirking, hunchbacked form and snark-atude of Richard of Gloucester. If it would have been possible to incarnate a bitchslap into the flesh of a mortal man, that man-monster would have been Richard. The King's right hand.

And was that - oh, god, the King's eyes were open. Old Hamlet had seen it all! Where had he learned to act so well? The man didn't have a wit in his body that wasn't traceable to lewd nursery rhymes and grotesque flatuence jokes.

It was the end of the world. Stately, humped Richard of Gloucester was tsk-tsking him. Still with the Prince's hand in a pirahna-like grip, he twisted Claudius' hand up so the tiny dram of poison tumbled into the fluffy frozen flakes on the frigging frost below. Dicky Glou's pencil mustache caught a single flake on it as he grabbed Claudius' other hand.

"Let's point those claws in a safer direction," he said, and kneed the Prince in the royal crotch. As Claudius fell to his knees and began cursing in high pitches, Richard turned to one of the bushes in the corner. Claudius' blood frosted over when a man in camoflauged livery emerged from the mass of leaves and icicles. "Did you catch all of that?"

"Aye, sire."

Old Hamlet was up on his feet now and gave his now-quadrapedal brother a punt in the ribs. "The passcode is, The sting. As in, the adder sting of a brother's treachery. What a rogue and peasant knave you are, dear brother. O, Horrible! Most horrible!"

Claudius tried his best to pout. Could he weasel his way out of this? He began: "O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven; It hath the primal eldest curse upon't, A brother's murther ..."

That got him another kick, this one to the head. His vision doubled. A fuzzy feeling came over him.

Richard whistled, and by the time Claudius had risen back to bipedal posture ... he was surrounded by pikes, and swords, and killy weapons from all over Scandinavia.

A long pause followed.

Prince Claudius suddenly realized the most amazing thing: he wasn't afraid. Not a whit. He saw Richard's eyes narrow.

It was then that Claudius, who had just attempted to murder his brother to steal his wife and crown, began to summon up all the powerful eloquence at his command. He suddenly felt very, very, very good.

It was as if the boot to his head had unlocked a golden river of persuasive selling power, awakened the giant within. He was suddenly very clear about his fate. _Watch me bust the hell out of this charge,_ he thought. _All eyes on me_. The rest of the crowd - guards, King, Richard - must have caught onto Claudius' revelation, because their faces were blanched white as virgin's sheets. He was more certain of it than he'd ever been of anything in his life.

"You have to work from one point to go to another," Claudius said. Shrugging his shoulders. "So I admire work ethic, I think it should be re-inforced through out our neigbourhoods, that everybody should work hard, practice makes perfect, you have to be diligent with what you want, you have to apply your-self, you have to motivate your-self. You have to do for-self by your self, and then you can do things for other people. But that's what I had to do, I had to do for-self." He tried to ignore a trickle of blood coming down his face. His tongue flicked out from the mouth-corner when the red drop came near his lips. _Mmmmmmm, coppery._

He checked back in with the onlookers. Gazes of mystic confusion on their faces. Or was that ... empathy? Sympathy? One of those two? Both? He always got them confused. Whatever, they were buying it. He began to pace like an orator. Even with the guard's swords pointed at his body, he had a little room. "I want, when they see me, They know that everyday when I'm breathing is for us to go further. Everytime I speak I want the truth to come out."

He locked eyes with his brother, who was still half-asleep and wholly bovine. "Everytime I speak I want a shiver. I don't want them to be like they know what I'm gonna say because it's polite." Old Hamlet took a brick-sized piece of mutton flesh off the bone and chomped it. No question, the King was falling under the witchcraft of his wit, his power to seduce with the music of his language.

Claudius knew he had 'em. "I'm not saying I'm gonna rule the world or I'm gonna change the world, but I guarantee you that I will spark the brain that will change the world. And that's our job, It's to spark somebody else whatching us. We might not be the ones, but let's not be selfish and because we not gonna change the world let's not talk about how we should change it. I don't know how to change it, but I know if I keep talking about how dirty it is out here, somebody's gonna clean it up."

_Diamonds and pearls, baby_, he thought. _Diamonds and pearls. _He let loose a little victorious chuckle.

Here is what the King, Richard, and the guards heard come from Claudius' mouth:

_Derpei sypitabam, perbrese Hydi mera nonteni msutkein cipnuhi asste nea iro sime: iwutbredlos Tys sijyhee nohdato edva rasfenu laed riq pedevo cixotci ileqe he, oelto sidene, far ipo timpio mo qe jeli... mseedirm hefedek ne co ru gefetlefom toc, wygnene, ulae vemegne ta li laopro tindim, rednajo! Bioa, hee gerci ytaeasi nre rees lefrtehliz lepttopte fuc pin lani metfere rafapi mtnalide Ninibibp aa, qes leflygadc si frorae tonem ga to fesatmpeo tas. Gihe wi ditali ta laf tateoo siun fese rijretes siada - mfo - pboosyne; hinerenol. Demreta, vano eip rosa na toappi e mbono tepetol geotcosc galninten zeo ris sogucastan; morciwe wyne lens nudina gahidoiper moqitgi sebase nzako tevtitep so nam, guppu cucata ra so: tile ha de na, toh nopec, sez pnutena o fela. Noneti rempabxre etupa rigam ntaety nafri fase Qet te zadojno cevhuon. Alofxi ri ocmet lzafigibte rsesfigeresbana feto nanncum lo sagbod er rinacbca poe sa hesefe pahipa matioybi wesidfod.  
_

He turned his back to the crowd and began to gesture wildly, as if in the Name of the Moon or summoning hell-bats to rescue him. Claudius heard someone mutter "O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!" "To feign madness to scurry out a lee of crime; all jades traffic so ..."

The wannabe-poisoner about-faced to see his audience. He raised his hands as if to say Ahhhh, whaddaya gonna do?. "There's matter in these sighs," Claudius said, pointing to no one in particular. "These profound heaves, brother, you must translate; 'tis fit we understand them. I'm not thuggin' for me, I'm thuggin' for my family, I pay all the bills, I feed my whole family, wrong or right, I do and I can't stop."

Old Hamlet frowned.

The entire group stood back in shock as Claudius burst out laughing. "I gotta big mouth, I can't help it, I talk from my heart, I'm real you know what I'm sayin whatever comes comes. But my controverse problems, It's not my fault, I try to find my way in the world you know, I try to be somebody instead of just, make money off of everybody."

_hackok compts refoundick exibers barrown bancilits bryard pecuffeus conven bellimpers destinte gracturners extings ditionmoses catialoe licize weepic ophindact arrase dybuns wrency seasseess irfishaded pronale regreer traniac indfier grimaggener _

He showed a row of teeth. "You know what I'm saying, so I go down paths that haven't been traveled before and I usually mess up, but I learn, you know what I'm saying, I come back stronger, I'm not talking ignorant, you know what I'm saying. So obviously put thought into what I do. So I think my mouth, my controverse, I have not been out of the paper since I joined Denmark ..."

_Combrapprest! Sobeattentes repleatele. Spawles, stignmentopong el-el-elevets ... quilost groids vacaptures? Vacaptures._

Old Hamlet's neck recoiled as if he'd been hit. He knew he wasn't the brightest mace in the armory but this was leper-talk. "God, but I hate Latin. What is he on about?"

Richard turned to the King. "Brain-worms, sir. The mad sir is perplexed; gaze upon his countenance, and know he is soaring, as eagles do, on goofeballes."

The half-assed fratricidal dick was still monologuing: "I've been in all, you know what I'm saying, my name has not been not uttered, you know what I'm saying, and that's good for me because I don't wanna be forgotten. If I'm forgotten then that means I'm comfortable and that means I think everything is okay."

_Telpif mersote rodoti mopotpanenonmi sovuol te hod oorym marastum foso, teutpas hiu ersysrid vohruvta - gpuu sotatassle gitno fey nouce - faqe nasa._

Richard smiled, a cat that has mauled a toddler. This would be easier than he thought. No blood. Not anymore. "Take him away. To the boo box."

The guards lugged Brother Claudius and his onslaught of mouthfoam and speech-spit away. "Nobody puts babby in the corner!" he screamed.

_Eke fe tas elemen eme bname sewnode!_

Old Hamlet snorted, and tossed his scoured mutton bone to the dog empire in the corner. "Divas."

Richard raised an eyebrow. "I beg your pardon, majesty?"

"Divas," said the King. "Divas. I knew him well, Richard. 'Twas was the name of the wolfhound in my youth. I rode him often. And one terrible year, circumstance demanded my family eat him one Christmas ... that was when proud Norway and his armies put the Kingdom to fire and this palace into famine. Mother, father, brother, myself, did partake of that delicacy for three weeks. I loved that dog. But Claudius smiled more."

"Of course, sire."

**SHAKE-SPARED: EVERYTHING GETS FIXED FOREVER. **

**ACT 1: SOMETHING BARD, SOMETHING BLUE **

_Ay marry, all mind's born to a cage_  
_Here and there the manner born doth rage_  
_A custom more honour'd than understood_  
_Man sans plan in the end's driftwood_  
_East and west, making us eat crow_  
_Shit, other nations, how like ye us now? _  
_With swinish phrase you'd soil our paragon_  
_Art indeed, but fuck your bitch echelon_  
_Sooner see you remnant-atize the eschaton_  
_Perform'd at height? Doth the pith and marrow shew?_  
_Been Attribut'd so often ye mother'd blew_  
_Me for some vicious mole of nature I dare feed_  
_Your birth wherein from my descent thou'rt keyed_  
_Not choosing my origin, or the o'ergrowth o' m'hose_  
_Remember this is breakdown, here comes the fail foreclose_  
- Prince Hamlet, Age 15, first joie-jump rhyme

_More matter, and less art, Hamlet._  
- Polonius, to the same.

_Ten years and ten months later. The University of Wittenberg. Germany. 6 a.m. Ish._

Horatio fell out of his bunk like a headshot zombie. Boom, headshot. That sort of undead tumble was not appreciated or advised for a student of Wittenburg. "Here falls a noble heart," he thought. Opening his eyes a sliver revealed three blue eyes, glowing like the northern borealis. All of them belonged to the sweet Prince of Denmark.

"Fuck!"

Hamlet was sitting on top of him. Horatio was pinned to the floor. The Prince spoke: "Hold perfectly still, guy. Fie, that I e'er drank hot elk's blood."

Horatio held perfectly still ... guy. His roommate was muttering OldSpeak, which meant Hamlet had gotten double-plus sloshed last night at Der Thirsty Scholar ... okay, that was to be expe

What the what of what was he wearing on his head?

"I see you are captivated by my helmet. When Rossss-key-us was an ac-tor, in Rome, he wore a cap such as this. I have made this helmet myself. It is a very good, very strong helmet that gives me magic powers. Do not be jealous of the helmet. It sees the truth. Do not mock me so with a disposition contrary to the hot and work of the forge within me. Julius Caesar wore a piece of impressive such as this."

"No, he didn't."

Hamlet went right on talking. "I made this myself. One day, such men as we are will all wear such helmet-of-war." The Prince of Denmark reached into his pocket and pulled out something shiny and pointed-looking. He fixed the thingy in a hole between the three eye goggles on his head piece. It was a diamond attached to a metal stick. Hamlet then attached a crank to the side of his helmet and began turning it. The diamond-tipped ... drill ... began to spin. Hamlet began to lower the front of his mask, and the drill with it, to a spot which Horatio guessed was the middle of his own forehead.

"Uh-"

"Yes. Do you see it? Now I will drill a third eye in you. Go to sleep. Go to sleep! Go to sleep! I will put the diamond joy in you. Then you will see the spiders of Mars. We shall _all see the sauce. We shall all be the boss._"

Okay, Horatio thought, I can handle this. Right, right, the solution. He had to give Hamlet his usual backwards talk. "Um ... me am unwanting ... to you not undrill me? It is most retrograde to our ... er ... undesires."

Hamlet wasn't blinking.

"Unplease?"

The Prince of Denmark sighed, and threw himself off Horatio. Curling himself up into a ball, he began to mutter. "Can't get away with nothin' ..." Then he toppled onto his side and began snoring. Loudly. After his father's manner.

"You are a warm beast and noble scholar, my lord."

_"heyholetsgo gibbagbbahey." _

After deciding not to take the Magic Helmet off his roommate, Horatio climbed back into his bed and pulled the sheets over his head. He wished he could tell himself that this had all been a dream, but it had been a normal week. He muttered, mostly to himself.

"Goodnight, you Princes of Denmark, you Kings of Trepanation."


	2. Act II: Past the Size of Dreaming

As usual, Horatio woke up tied to his bed by giant ropes. They were the kind used on real sailing ships, not the piddly string one ties to one's finger to remind oneself to _Remember appointment _or _Eat king _or _Burn horse soon. _

Horatio turned his head. By the pile of cloth on the floor not far from him, he could surmise that Hamlet had nailed all of the furniture to the ceiling. There wasn't much. A table, chairs, chest. The Prince had not secured the chest with anything stronger than twine, hence the clothes pile.

Hamlet was fond of practical jests and japery. It came to him by nature, like the knack of whispering to horses, dogs, or drunks. And even if he hadn't been so inclined, there are evening classes you can take for this sort of endeavor. However, nobody has ever found one of these classes, however, no teacher ever shows up to teach them, the checks written to pay for such classes are forgeries, and the students would never be serious about it anyway. So it is that in the end that Nature is the best teacher. Not because Nature is wise and patient, but because Nature is always there like taxes.

The young man inhaled and exhaled. The ropes slackened. Sloppy work this morning. Horatio got a heavy feeling in his stomach. Watching Hamlet was like tracking a subtle prey that gave away its signs in subtle and marvelous ways.

To those who knew how and what to look for, the Prince's moods were as obvious as a dragon at a bake sale. He could tell. "There's something on his mind," Horatio thought, as he too, too easily undulated his body to loosen the coils binding him.

He began to move his shoulders in counterpoint rhythm, making bigger and bigger movements as the area near his collarbone and the top of his chest became loose. The Prince did like his knots. With that done, Horatio's head was free to move, and did.

Using his teeth, Hamlet's roommate lifted up his pillow to reveal the knife he'd secreted away there the night before. Grabbing one end with his canines, he turned his neck and with enough momentum made a very small toss down to his left hand, which, like the right one, had been tied down to the bedframe at the wrist, separately from the rest of the body with thinner rope.

With the knife in fingers it was preschool to undo the rest of the imprisoning cords and in five minutes Horatio was up on his feet and even more concerned about his friend's wellbeing.

Horatio pondered this as he went over to the stone wall. "Either the man is sad or distracted, he thought. He never gets sad, so he must have some new plan. Those separate into the possibly dangerous, the very dangerous, and causes-of-war."

With the knife, he worked away at a big loose stone until he was able to pull it away from the wall. Behind the stone was a hollow Horatio had dug out. "It must be a middling sort of plan, for he still remembered to secure me to the bed. So the _very dangerous_ it is." His own possessions, including day clothes, were in there. All of the furniture on ceiling leave was the Prince's. The rest of Horatio's stuff would arrive today by post.

This was not unexpected. It was the beginning of the semester, after all. Hamlet's typical start-of-school antics. The rather poorly-executed tie-down, which had not tested Horatio's escape skills in the latest, was of concern. He'd ask the gang about it. He put the knife back under his pillow and then changed clothes.

During the nights he had heard the pile of drunk person that was Prince Hamlet rocking back and forth on its side and muttering "blood blood blood blood blood blood blood-" which Hamlet swore down and up was his family crest.

Now according to all of the books and Gutenpapers that was just factually untrue on the face of it, but then again it had been an entire summer. You never knew if Elsinore would pull something like that. It wouldn't be the first weird thing they'd done.

Horatio pressed an unmarked spot on the wall he knew well. A clanking sound echoed inside the stones, and a seam darting between the stones became visible.

Near the seam was a stone a stuck out a little bit more than its brothers. The young man put his fingers into a small depression in the rock and pulled out. The seam widened and as the hinges swung, another deep-set hollow, this one about the size of a small chicken coop, was revealed.

Unlike a real chicken coop, this place was not filled with politics and scheming. Only murder toys.

Horatio looked inside. All of his rowdy friends were there: poniard, hiebmesser, triple spring dagger, a modified brandistock, sharpened stick, flamberge, (ironically next to the) sword breaker, cinquedea, another rapier, scissoris, push-dagger. A pair of Cestus somebody had gotten somewhere. Horatio mostly kept them there for decoration. Leaning up against the inner wall was the awesome but impractical lantern shield. Wooooohoooo.

Of course some weapons aren't your friends. Every time he saw that blue staff and its three spheres, Horatio wanted to break it over the maker's head. Klimbattakt, they called it, but it didn't help you climb or give you tact. It had two functions, far as Horatio could tell: jack, and shit.

The problem was that he kept receiving gift weapons. None of them were small.

You couldn't get rid of them, sometimes they weren't easy to destroy, so you had to keep them. They had names and lore you were supposed to remember as well.

All of them were pretty worthless as nine times out of ten the weapon _looked _cool but the person who had forged it or wielded it was disappeared or long dead and in reality the people who were giving it to you were doing it to get the cursed thing out of their attic and into yours.

It was like being given a pet for Christmas when you already had too many dog and cats as it was. Horatio was still looking. Whinyard, adaga, no.

The mysterious and (to Horatio) hateful staff with the red sphere and golden head, _Rakingpart _or something. None of these weapons were in books. Oh, he had been assured it was a great battle gift, but "mythical weapons" were about as common as chunks of the True Cross.

"And just as real," he thought.

Another two weeks of his life had been wasted on that. Two jars of bloat poison, one of thalot, next to a tube of the toxic powder that men called "Vizzini's folly." _That _actually worked.

Ah, there it was. Behind the exotic chemicals. Horatio's favorite dirk. He only brought it out for special occasions, or when he was feeling insecure. The one gift weapon he truly loved. Given to him by a Spanish nobleman, the _Algundia Estovaa Serveer_ was not merely theoretically useful, it was easy on the eyes.

He slipped it in his coat and went to the privy to slap some water on his face.

When Horatio reached J's door he knocked five times. No answer. "Well," he said aloud, "they never get up before ten anyway." The rest of the University was wide awake and buzzing like so much oversugared retiree.

He pushed aside the wine bottles beside the floor mat and sat down. He had checked out a book yesterday from the school's library.

**I see Queen Gab hath been with you: Ten years of Text and the Cities. **

**By Mercutio Escalus, Your roving correspondent. **

The book had been a bestseller. He opened the volume to a heavily-dog-eared section and began reading mid-page:

-{~~}-

"... and are you hunting rabbits, Vicar?" Which meant we'd be eating nasty tomorrow. Same as it ever was: ask for me tomorrow, and find me a rave man.

Men's eyes were made to look and let them gaze. I will not budge for no man's pleasure, I. Unless he's made for sportive tricks. In that case, open, locks, whoever knocks! First you get the money, then you get the Mercutio ...

-{~~}-

Horatio shut the book, and smiled. It reminded him of a messy room in a Roman villa years ago.

_"Do you really have to go? What a pretty piece of flesh thou art."_

_Horatio lit a weed. "Darling, we already went several times."_

_A vine of smoke grew out of his lips, "And I must say. I was impressed that Italy _can _get on top of things, after all. When they put their mind to it."_

_The Italian laughed. "A bawd, a bawd, a bawd! so ho!" Silence. Horatio puffed a few times. Right then a flash of steel. Yes, there was a blade at his throat. The Italian spoke again, with a smile walking in the words: "Is Horatio there?" _

_Horatio disarmed the Italian without the least bit of concern. "A piece of him." _

_"A piece of him?" The Italian attempted to put on a brave face. "I tend to notice little things like that." _

_It was Horatio's turn to laugh. "Tush, tush, 'twill not appear." Another moment of quiet passed between them. Then, in a quarterblink, the smoldering ash of Horatio's weed was on the floor, and Horatio himself on his back. He let the Italian tie him to the bedposts. _

_To do otherwise seemed would have seemed ... shabby. _

_It wouldn't do to make a habit of it, though._

_Horatio lifted an eyebrow. "Do you expect me to talk?" _

_"No, Mister H," said Mercutio, glint in his eye, "I expect you to _bi."

The door behind him opened and Horatio fell back into the living space. He looked up to see Julez in her underwear and one of the new undershirts that you could wear casually. Indoors.

Her armpits hadn't been shaved and the dragon tattoo she had begun back in the spring now ran from the bicep of her left arm to the elbow of her right one. He could make out the dragon's hump on her breast bone. Julez had a tankard of morning ale in one hand and a lit weed in the corner of her mouth.

Every single finger wearing a silver ring of different make. She was the first Italian punk chick, but she won't be the last, that's for sure.

"How now! who calls?" she bellowed.

She looked down at the prone figure on her doorstep.

"Hey, Lord fuckwad, how's life on the planet bitch? Get your ass in here and be yo'd."

"Always nice to see you too, Capulet." He stood up. His eyes flicked up to her Mohawk. "Blue's a good color for you."

"Thanks. I was going to get pierced again but the guy I used went all Claymore fetishist. I don't have _that _much skin to gouge away. Actually, I'm kidding. I think I just got tired of poking holes in myself."

She belched and pointed to her hair. "If all else fails, myself have power to dye," she said in perfect Oldspeak. "Howzabout you? You get dirty-handed this summer?"

She looked at his book. "Oh, Jesus shitbitch. Really, Horatio? Really? God. Why don't you just read the autobiography of a bag of dicks while you're at it?"

"What's a shitbitch?" he said.

Julez is one of the few people who know what Horatio's job actually is. And what a shitbitch might be.

He decided to go on: "Poor Juliet. Heart broken forever by a man who had no eye for the ladies. I'm surprised you're not best friends forever, though. Just like we'll be. Joo. Lee. Et." He drew out the hateful full name like a man removing a tapeworm. Nobody likes a tapeworm. Even tapeworms have issues with their own bodies. It's really quite a shame.

"Fuck you. Also, answer my question."

"No, I did not get ... get bloody-handed. This summer."

It is a fact to all people in Horatio's business, and a fact unknown to snotty yet jaw-droppingly attractive punk rock riot razor grrrls, that the majority of business is done during the part of year known in the business as "Weeps Week." Then the awards are passed out, there's parties and the recriminations in the trade papers begin the next day. Like most family reunions.

She snorted. "Must be a flaccid time for you, left hanging like so much horse thief."

"You have no idea."

She arched her eyebrows and gave that killer smile, mouth spread a little wider than normal, all bright teeth and high cheekbones below black eyes. "Oh? I think I do." Julez put her black-polish thumb against her right nostril. She exhaled out a snot rocket of blood and coked-up mucus. She saw it land and gave a low whistle.

A small, petulant voice came from somewhere in the dorm room behind them. . "Um, could ... could you guys keep it down? I've got a hangover."

Julez laughed and shouted over her shoulder. "You bitch by the book." She turned back to Horatio. "Yeah. The retarded get re-started every semester. It's like I have to break them in again. Gallop in place, you fiery-footed dweebs."

Horatio followed her in and they find a place on the floor next to the low table. Julez pushed a general assortment of what she referred to as _our random shit, sorry for the mess _and got out a mirror.

Into the room walked the owner of the sad voice, Tibs. Julez's cousin. She stood up and kissed him on the head. He rubbed the back of his noggin and made some hello whimpering sounds.

"Hey, Tibs," Horatio said. "How're the model ships going?"

Tibs rubbed his eyes, dark circles underneath them. "Still in bottles."

Juliet opened a sack and began to dump out a white, sugary powder. "Nothing stays in bottles for long here. Amirite?"

"You're a lot of things but right isn't usually one of them," Tibs replied.

Juliet rolled her eyes. "There's the Prince of Catty I was waiting to see. Your bathrobe smells like my mom's benders. Which is to say, my birthdays."

"Maybe you were wearing it."

The girl chuckled. "I wasn't wearing anything last night."

"Or the night before that!" The words were hanging in the air for just a moment, oily, a herald that announced the arrival of the third roommate from the third bedroom. Play-ertes, as he called himself, yawned and oozed into the common area, the lounge-lizardness of him sexually harassing empty space.

Horatio frowned. He hadn't seen him since the Spring when he went on the Grand Tour, for some reason. No advance warning or anything.

Julez, Tibs, and Playertes lived in a three-bedroom apartment on-campus setup. There was something that could considered a living room once the geological layers of sediment of bottles-ashtrays-paper-food could be cleaned up. But like the rebuilding of Babel, nobody could ever get around to it.

Julez looked at the supposed player and smiled. "I've seen this a million times. Daddy's boy falls for some bad sock, and then he goes and gets himself all riled up. Then it's love and kisses until the sock fucks him over and _cannot be worn_. Then of course the pregnancy comes, and all bets are off."

Playertes shrugged his shoulders, not caring or just too tired to debate his reputation as a desperate molester of foot-clothing. When he was sure the others were not looking, a single tear rolled down his cheek … _like a snake_.

Julez passed the mirror to Tibs. He padded his robe and then checked the pockets. "I don't have my dagger."

She turned to Horatio. "Use that knife in Horatio's pocket. Hor, give Tibs the one you brought here because you thought you'd get jumped by the Norwegian tool-hunter's brigade or whatever."

Horatio handed Tibs the knife. He had learned not to question how she did. She was Julez. She knew things.

Courtesy demanded that the guest get first go. Horatio bent over and breathed in the strange New World powder through his nose. He really shouldn't, but he was ever a courteous man.

Halfway through the line, Julez cracked an evil smile. "His nibs left something for you, Horsabunch. But don't stop 'till you get enough."

She slapped down a folded piece of parchment paper with a red wax seal on it made by Hamlet's signet ring. Horatio opened it.

"Hey, professor," it read, "can all your science explain _this_?"

There was a drawing. It was such a drawing. What a drawing this was. If you had a child, and this child had brought home a drawing like this, it would make you change your stance on time travel and abortion both. It wasn't just anatomically impossible.

It wasn't just foul. It wasn't that it was sexual. It was that it was all these things, _and _poorly drawn. Which was weird, too.

Hamlet had studied. The Artist currently known as a Prince was a good draftsman. And on top of all of this, it was his way of saying "I love you." It actually read that, in fact, on the centaur's-

_I must not read, _Horatio began to tell himself. _Reading is the mind-killer…_

Then he unintentionally read the line below the drawing, which was even worse. There are many bad things in this universe, very few of which are poetic. Of these truly horrible things, almost all of the worst of them rhyme with each other.

But these truly dreadful events are actually quite rare. Thus, thankfully, we may say that statistically events are unlikely to go from bad to verse.

This _was one of those times. _Hamlet ended his "letter" with:

"I'll take care of our theater problem today without a hitch.

Fuckin' miracles all up in this bitch."

**SHAKE-SPARED: EVERYTHING GETS FIXED FOREVER. **

** ACT 2: I AM THE BARD WOLF**


	3. Act III: This Above All Else

_And so it came to pass, like kidney stones ... _

"O proud left foot, that journeys safe anon," the young man intoned over the chalky head-shaped lump recently dumped out of a brown wool sack. He had just stepped out of the shadows, and he, the sack, and the lump were positioned on the ledge of a church bell-tower topped with a gothic spire and festooned with dead pigeons, many still edible.

The church itself was ancient and large. This particular house of worship also served an educational need. Far below him, next to the giant churchy edifice, the children of Wittenberg Grammar School ran wild and free, wee Huns all. Anarkids.

One of the young beastlings looked up, and then the rest followed suit, all shifting their eyes from quaint child games of Jack-Inquistor and Who's-the-traitor-kill-kill to the man in black looming over the church yard from his position on the roof.

Whispers of "Roofie!" and "_Tres_ _Byronique_!" whipped through the crowd at rumor-velocity. The man in black was wearing a mask, but his lack of breasts made his gender clear, despite the highly fashionable long black cape wrapped around his shoulders.

On the heights of this building, with a sack, he reminded all of them of an evil St. Nick with eating issues and (apparently) wicked sharp sniper vision.

"Jump already!" one kid whispered, who believed that some grownups could fly.

"Might as well jump!" said her friend, who knew they could not.

A nearby teacher, Ms. Anne Page, sat and watched the free-range kindergarchy gape and ooh at the strange man above. She smiled. As the rest of the staff out on the playground stood shocked at the possible suicide case above them - what will happen? Won't somebody think of the children? - she was remarkably indifferent.

_Almost every child has a mouth. Lots of children means lots of mouths. The more fear, the less eating, and the fewer plaintive cries for "More, sir," and in turn fewer musical numbers following. Why the hell am I thinking this?_ she began to wonder.

And then stopped. "Ah, right. How soon I forget. Nothing is crueler than a child," Anne thought, "save a child with a monkey's paw. With, or without the power of cruel wishes. Ever have old Bible proverbs recognized this solemn truth."

Another famous proverb mentions that, as all dogs go to heaven, so do the eyes of innocents in the end return to focus on the gross, degusting, and really cool. So Ms. Page was not gasted, nor flabbered, as the eyes of the Wittenberg Grammar School moppets focused on the strange white lump the man in black had just dumped on the roof. The kidolatry was approaching limit-break levels.

It was at that moment that the headmaster of the Grammar School and Chairman of the town's Temperance and Anti-Prostitution Committee, Professor John Falstaff, emerged from the medieval church door. You could hear him when he ran, guhh and hoooming from far away.

The man-mountain loved to make sounds. "GUHHH! Yes, hmph harrah! I get what the hell is going on very well - some two bit Jack of the Pack outside? Nobody ever took John Falstaff by surprise when I had my belt on! My belt's always on! Yes, but I, bother it, I can barely be bothered to talk some sense into whomever's out heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee," he said. The E-recital went on. And on.

And on.

**SHAKE-SPARED: EVERYTHING GETS FIXED FOREVER.**

**ACT 3: BARD RAIN GONNA FALL**

...

And on.

His voice turned into a glassy tube of girlish scream noises as he saw the man in black's cloak blow in the strangely-timed breeze like the flag of the United Providential Republick of Ye Badd-Asse. The childreschoolers took in a sharp breath of air.

"This is fucking bullshit," said a little boy, one Gunter Hafsabeck. He'd been waiting for the roof-guy to do something but so far there had been just posturing; more posing than you ever see at a funeral.

"You said it, dad-mattress" said his best friend Heidi Laudann. Then they both giggled HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA.

And on.

Falstaff was waving his walking stick around like a walking sword. He began speaking like a Roman Senator. Or at least that was how he comported himself, as if delivering a lecture to Hannibal Barca, the would-be conqueror of the Eternal City.

Looking back long after, Anne was startled by how little she had noticed the Headmaster's incipient madness before then. His speech was ... interesting.

She told herself that surely there probably had been mighty eloquence in that mouth once, but all Anne remembered later from his "to arms" speech was something along the lines of "Bacon-fed knaves! they hate us youth: down with them! A hand, the man's job is to charge! Give a little bit! Babylonish captivity! Of your love to me! Guhhhh! I am cake boss! A plague of all cowards, I say, and a vengeance too! Hoooooom true beliefser! Excelsioreeeeeeeee!"

Falstaff ... was indeed the cake boss.

The dark man looked at the yelling man. That was how the class of Grammar School learned to tell when a masked figure is laughing under disguise.

"I heard he's never known the touch of a woman," said Gretl Halzenbach, looking at the Professor, now clocking in at an easy twelve megaloons per rant second.

"You mean the nasty kind?" said Wilhelm Erbach.

"Does your mother do any other kind, Erbitch? You are so dumb! You are really dumb, FOR REAL." replied Gunter. Then he began to cry. He and Willy had always looked too alike for comfort.

Gretl had no sympathy for either. "A good son would have known."

She felt a hand on her shoulder, both comforting her and trying to give her a nerve squeeze. It was Heidi, telling her, in her own way, that Gunter had learned too late that man is a feeling creature and because of this the greatest in the universe.

"I could sing psalms or anything! A plague of all cowards, I say still!" the large-gutted man bellowed. He turned to a child nearby and smacked a cup of goat's milk out of his hand, who'd been tugging on the Prof's sleeve to tell him the yelling hurt his ears. "What! A young knave, and begging! Is there not wars?"

As the man above did not answer, the pale fat man grew much paler but not less beefy, nor less squealy. Anne rolled her eyes as the man the children called Fail-staff began gibbering at his teachers to do their muscular Christian duty and toss some serious rocks at the interloper above. Nobody listened to him. He had failed to stop the little darlings from selling cigarettes and pornography to each other, after all.

Everybody around Falstaff, including the black figure above, began to realize the Professor was talking to persons who weren't really there, on subjects that did not really exist, quoting from books never written, all of which was a visible sign of the sudden breakdown of a mind that wasn't much there to begin with. Oh god, was he giving the straight-arm salute to everybody?

He _was_. _Why_?

"Relieve on me who relieves on you! No flippancy! Guhhhhhh! Honor is more than the word! They vaporised into a mystical love radiation that spread across the universe! Hooooom! Never say flip mode is the best! What says the doctor to my water?"

Young Anne Page understood that the attention of children was a double-edged sword. It was simply a matter of grokking some basic truths: in the centuries before civilization, when children were less something to be educated and more something to be brunched upon, scholars of all species (mostly rock and tiger-based ones) debated just why children were (first) so stupid, and (second) why they were into nasty things.

The emotionless stones and blood-drinking cats didn't have language, or scholarship, sapience, or thought, or irony, so there was no real answer to either question.

But even without language, there were generally agreed-upon answers among the creatures of the wild. They were something completely different. Page knew this was because animals have no god.

The answer among the nonhumes to the first question was that babies drank, a lot, and wouldn't admit they had a problem, even when you confronted them about it. _Especially _when you confronted them about it. Changing the subject from "bwaaah?" to "boooaaaah!" was a cheap whoreson's move.

The thought about baby drunks made Mistress Page smile. "Babies are the magic missile that we shoot to kill bad futures, which turn out to be the futures where endangered animals stick around existing." She said that to no one in particular. No one ... but the universe.

Of course, back then, among the animals, it was assumed human breastmilk was deeply alcoholic. The answer to the second was that they spent a long time puking. Or something else.

Actually, Anne disliked that explanation, now that she thought about it for the first time ever. She had spent less time on history than she would've liked. And biology. And some other stuff.

"Oh well," she said, looking at the gang tattoos she'd received after her fifth year as one of the "Merry Knives of Windsor" on the streets of London.

Back then, instead of going to college, she'd spent her time reading fantasies written by deluded feverish members of the Brit peerage. With that, she came back to the present moment, where:

"GUHHHH WIN! AND LIVE! LOSE AND DIE RULE! OF LIFE! NO CHANGE RULE HOOOM! A MAN'S FORCE! IT COMES FROM COMBINING!"

Falstaff had never combined with anyone. Falstaff fact.

Anne shook her head. "Professor Falstaff, please. I think you're overreacting, sir." And overacting, she thought.

Falstaff looked at her askance, somewhere between offended and "I am disappoint, choke." His brown suit was on the verge of being soaked by manly tears, and the headmaster's chest was moving up and down fast now, as he took deeper and deeper breaths.

He regained his composure for the moment. "Guhhh! Ma'am, you're mistaken, I'm a vet, I'm a Knight and master swordsman. Truly, I must turn away some of my followers."

Falstaff fact: Falstaff was and had none of these things.

Anne was not master of repressing her own snickering.

Falstaff, like many older people, tended to fall back into OldSpeak when he was incontinent, crapulent, or some power combo of both. "What, art thou mad? art thou mad? is not the truth the truth? Thou, thy words are inept reproaches! By the mass, I bless the day I was made immune to thou and all thy kind!"

"*giggle, snort* Muwa Hahahahaha *wheeze* muwaHahahahaha wheeze* muwaHahahahaha..."

"Dost thou hear me, Mistress Page?" His mustache was getting more sweat laden into it by the second.

"Y-Y-Yes, professor!"

He turned and pointed his face speak-hole to the roof-man, so he could screech again proverbs to the grey sky like a rooster with a barnpile of maxims fresh from the pretentious blowhard jubilee. "I SURVIVED THE DARKNESS TO FIGHT WITH YOU! I ATTACK THE DARKNESS! GUHHH HOOOM GUHHH HOOOM!"

Then he had to "sit" "down," as he'd fallen from the standing up position to the number eight hyperventilation fun lay-down pose.

"Am I a Falstaff dreaming I am god, or a god Falstaffing I am a dreamer?" he blurbled to himself as the inky waters of bio-enforced sleepytime washed over the waking world of melodramatic personal embarrassment.

The tot rabble had seen Failstaff fall over such many times. One of the kids was poking him with a blunt stick (one of the nicer ones), whispering, "Mr. Thou? Mr. Thou!"

A few of the brat pack turned to sit on the prostrate form of the headmaster to rest their legs. Those brave souls didn't mind the cabbage smell that the man carried around him like a loose ladies garment.

But most of the crowd hadn't budged; they were too busy keeping their eyes turned to the head-shaped lump that was still sitting there, on the ledge, next to the man dressed all dark.

Greta had her eyes there, too. The whitish lump had several head-like properties and many similarities in general to known human heads, because it was a human head. You'd be surprised how many heads are like themselves.

It was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.

And at that very moment, when the twin realizations of headness and deadness had collided in the heads of so many, that the mystery man in the mask lifted up the head in one hand and began to address it in gentlemanly tones. It looked as if he was about to deliver a soliloquy.

The children, however, knew a lesson when they heard, saw, and smelled it, and so en masse shut up as Black Mask began to wax eloquent, or as eloquent as you could from a church steeple in a big theater cape. It also helped that Black Mask was speaking very _loud_.

"In a hole in the ground," the dark man said, "there lived a head. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a head-hole, and that means good eatin's for all of god's bright and beautiful creatures. I liberated that head. One day we all be as such! Future events such as these will affect you ... in The Future. How are you gentlemen? You know what you doing. Here I stand, on Lookout Mountain."

Anne's eyes grew almost two sizes that day, in both fear and reverence.

"He tampered in God's domain ..." she whispered.

The unconscious man on the ground talked quietly in his sleep. "The day that Falstaff visited your bledchamber, madam, was the greatest day of your life. But for Falstaff ... it was Wlendsday."

The man in black bent over the head and did something to it that made a trail of smoke begin to come out of the head's eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.

Then the masked man began to sing at the top of his lungs:

_You got the touch_

_You got the powaaaaaah_

And whipped his mask off.

The silent gapes below turned into cheers after the Prince of Denmark kicked the preserved head of lifeless Martin Luther from the top of the church. It went shooting through the air like a missile of blessed heresy.

The adults began to scream when one of the sharp-eyed teachers noticed the Protestant head piece and one-time scourge of Popes was stuffed with gunpowder, now of course smoking. The head that had drafted the 95 Theses exploded midflight in a thunderous boom, showering the stupefied onlookers with ooey brain gore, skull bone fragments, Medieval old person teeth, future trauma, and the vague smell of beer and formaldehyde. Like a disco ball that shoots off filth-gristle and not fancy light. In Wittenberg in the early 17th century, gore was beginning.

An old man watching croaked, "in my day, we just threw them!" Long afterwards, it would be agreed that giving the Prince access to graveyards ("Uh, I need them to brood. 'Cause I can be ... um ... real sad, and stuff") had been a Very Bad Thing. Somebody set up us the bomb, it was later noted.

That was when Horatio arrived. Julez ran behind him soon after.

He began to hit his head against the metal gate to the churchyard as the sound of children laughing and playing with new squishy toys mixed in with the shrieks of the broken middle-aged coming across the air to him. "It has happened before," he said aloud to himself, "but there is nothing to compare it to now."

Julez was bent over cackling. Choking on her own joy, she reared up to shout at Hamlet: "You have no chance to survive make your time!" He waved back.

_Bump bump bump_. It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. And the show must go on.

And on.


	4. Act IV: Emperor of Infinite Space

They all have names they've given themselves. To tell themselves that they are not what they were called when young. To remind them that they're not their position. That's the problem with a name nobody remembers. Not so much a problem for them as it is for the world. See, there are precious things in this world, and heavy doors to guard them, and also there are persons there to guard the doors. But doors will open with keys, and people open with keys too. A different kind of key. The key has a lot of names. Fear, love, illusion. When you're someone who everybody knows, you're stuck as one thing all of the time. Alexander of Macedon can only ever be one thing. Every man plays in his time many parts? Wrong. As with everything else in the world, there's unequal distribution. Some people get to play one major role and never stop. And then there are forgotten people who have to play role after role until they die.

But when you have a name that people forget, you have the room to change, and reason, all in one.

**ACT IV: ALL TOGETHER NOW**

There was an inn. The place in Europe doesn't matter. Call it Boheme. Call it Milan. It might be the lightless suburb of London. It might be a forest outside Paris. It was night, and that is a country all its own. The inn was out in the wild, by a road that was not very busy even in busy times, and certainly not that night. There is a place like this in every town. Everyone knows this sort of house or building. It may be found in neighborhoods of every sort. Where low talking and looking over the shoulder is native.

The inn was a new place to all of the guests there. The Small-named souls stepped into an inyard that evening. Some came by horse and some by shadow, secret dukes from dark corners and shade-walkers. The inn was empty otherwise.

The landlord was non-mysteriously on vacation. The leader of the group that was meeting there that night was one of the owners - perhaps it would be more appropriate to call him the owner of the owner of the owner of the owner. He had made sure that the road was blocked off by armed halberdmen for miles in every direction and rumors of wolfpacks were circled for a week before they were gathering. Not that there needed to be much precaution. Despite the advances of the Danish tech, the main conveyance in the rough parts of Europe is still horses, and horses hate magic.

There was one servant there. Most of the common people are like horses. Fact is, most animals can detect incantations. Sorcery is like sea legs. There is a natural curve to getting used to and over the nausea and other pains that comes with magic. Most animals and people don't even know why they suddenly get sick at moments during the day, or why their ears suddenly burn. Something just tells them to go in a different direction. And they do.

So most people don't like it. Not the Dauphin, though. It wasn't that the Dauphin liked magic. He didn't care. The servant stood there in the corner of the yard, and watched the great strange people come by portal and passage animal. One exited a carriage with a rotting side that came from the lightless road off to the East. The Dauphin spit on the ground.

New people who came to the inn laughed to hear him called that name. Everybody laughed at it, of course. The funny thing, or the cruel thing, depending on how you looked at it, was that the Daupin wasn't a liar. He _was _royal. His last name was Bourbon. A very large name.

Empires wax and wane, states cleave sunder and coalesce. That's what the Dauphin told himelf.

Bad enough that by a trick of fate his grandfather lost in a court contest nobody remembered anymore, and his branch of the royal tree withered. He remembered when the first revolutions came on down from the North of Europe and began to push the Crowned Houses of the Continent to jettison nobility like the rising sun casts away the night's stars. That would have been bad enough, but the world kept changing when Duke Prospero brought his books of magic and his books of machines both back up to that godforsaken godless frozen castle in the North. The Dauphin's father said the world had really began to upend then.

That was before the family had been torn apart and sent out in the world to make their way out of the poverty that had been their lot. The indignity of it ached the Dauphin's teeth. A world where the stock of royal blood that wasn't Danish had fallen, fallen, fallen in price and was never to ascend again.

"How right he was," said Bourbon to no one in particular. He remembered when, crawling from his broken-legged horse one windy night, he had limped to this building where these sons and daughters of whores were gathering tonight, and asked - no, demanded, with his haught and signet ring, a mount. How terrible their laughter was. In another world, he supposed, the middling sort of France would have paraded his kind around the public square and dropped a knife on them.

A terrible thing, a mass of objects, no man ... it came out of a purple circle of fire that had just opened on the dirt floor of the stable. The Dauphin saw it shuffle across the yard and restrained himself from vomiting. It ignored the serving-man and slid through the door that had been left open for it.

At least that would have been a death of dignity, the Dauphin thought, a courageous martyrdom among the gaping, brown-toothed _canaille_. The way the winesellers and printers and college-madamesoilles and technomancer-apprentices and steammaestros and philsophepops was worse.

They laughed at him, then ignored him, and in the end pitied him. The grapeshot of those cackles from the petit bourgeouise of that eve stuck in his flesh and in his heart, and was an agony worse than the arm he had cracked and the ankle he had twisted. His fine clothes and golden ring were pawned that eve, and after a month of rooming and two of drinking, he had pawned his dignity too and became the majordomo of sorts for this place. It was a death to him. Which explained why he was there that night, in a way.

The owner of the inn, a large, jolly man named Phillip, had turned pale when a messenger had told him the strange people were meeting there a week before, and then he had turned shocked when the Dauphin had volunteered to stay.

The Dauphin had then explained to the owner, who he thought of as a half-human oaf, that nobility in most societies attains that exalted rank by being a warior class, or the descendants of warriors. There were no more battles in the future for the Dauphin to fight. Facing horrors was all he had left. It was all well and good for the witless, barnyard class that Phillip belonged to be frightened, the Dauphin told him. I shall play grand host to Monsieur Horror and his court of terrors.

"I am the cleanup man at the final stage of Cavalry," he had said. Phillip had been too impressed or too scared to be insulted, so he had said something uplifting and patted the Dauphin on his shoulder like a comrade. The Dauphin was too depressed and too dependent on the man to demand justice for being so cavalier with his person, and so let the trifling breach of protocol stand. It was the prerogative of the high-born to be forgiving at times.

Phillip had lost a wife and just buried his father. The Dauphin was not made of sterner stuff, but believed himself to be.

The Dauphin had been told there would be thirteen of them. The ... _thing_ he had just seen made the last of the three-and-ten. He began to walk to the lighted tavern to serve the ... _guests_ ... food.

He had heard a drunken Phillip, face not red but white, eyes wide, whisper to him before of the strangers who owned him and men like him in towns across Christendom. It was wild speculation, but even the Dauphin had been a little put on edge by the man's tone.

As a child, Bourbon had heard the voice of his wetnurse explain to him the world of witches and how demons made their work on Earth. Her pattern of speech was that of a practiced bard: her voice trembled appropriately when she spoke of the secret black mass and went high with crackling malice when she recounted to the young Dauphin the ways of the King-of-Terrors as the dark one spoke in men's ears and put his hands on their faces to rend them, make them horrible like him. That was fear by art.

Phillip was not a lover of scary stories, and so hearing him speak in this way was like seeing a grown man try to fit into clothes too small for him. These were not the kind of words that the Dauphin would look back on and smile with pleasure and fond memories. That was fear by nature.

The Dauphin walked inside. He walked down a narrow hallway and went into the private room in the back where his guests waited.

His heart froze.

To say that his heart froze does not do much credit to the human heart or to the laws of nature. Many people are said to have hearts frozen at moments that are horrifying, and it has become motheaten to say that a heart froze. The expression is overused and has lost much of its power.

But that is exactly what Monsieur Bourbon's heart did.

[{~|~}]

In the back room of the tavern is a table with thirteen chairs around it. The table itself is long and glossy and rectangular, of deep brown polished wood. The light is cheerful. The candles are many. There is a narrow red-carpeted, and the hallway widens out into a trumpet-like-mouth and the red carpet yields to a floor of black speckled floor; the glossy brown table is actually somewhat in the mouth of the long hallway. Around and behind the hallway's trumpet-mouth, the room walls are curvilinear; viewed from above, the floor plan would look like a cupid's arrow; the shaft is the hallway and the walls are the heart-shaped arrowhead; the table is place at the nexus of where arrowhead meets shaft.

This is not the back room of this tavern.

This room was built for them, he realizes. This is the room on the surface of the world where the bent people gather. It was made over if it was built for them this evening. All of the trappings: the fireplace behind the Leader at the head, the walls. God. God. God.

The room smells awful. But there is something burning in the fireplace that is masking it. All of the guests in their chairs are in grey robes. You can't see any of their faces. Even the ... heap of something is covered in a kind of grey tarp. It looks like a pile of trash has been dumped in a fancy chair. The Dauphin can see rats running around inside the pile. They aren't leaving the heap. Nobody seems to care. There's something floating with a grey robe on ... _something in one of the seats is ten feet tall and breathing like the lungs of a mountain_...

A snap of gloved fingers draws the Dauphin's attention. It's the fellow at the table's head. The Dauphin looks dead ahead at the person who's just summoned his attention, wills his peripheral vision to shut off.

The Leader at the head of the table has his robe on. There's a black shadow where the face ought to be. A very nice, soft, voice, sounding more educated than the Dauphin's, comes from the hood of the Leader.

"We thought that this might be easier for you. We're all looking forward to your hospitality tonight, your highness."

The tone isn't mocking. It's sincere. It's Christ-like, even. The man keeps speaking.

The Dauphin has an eye for clothes, of course, or did when he could afford them. The first thing he notices is not the Leader's voice. It's the gloves that the Leader is wearing. A pair of classy, old-fashioned rich guy white dress gloves. Attached to them are a pair of suit cuffs and shirt cuffs with cuff links, all of which are very nice-looking, immaculately cut, groomed. The Dauphin sees none of this person's skin, just the gloves, the suit cuffs, the suit cuffs.

The Leader is still speaking to the Dauphin, filling the air with strange and wonderful compliments. He's telling the Dauphn that the strange rope-looking thing in his gloved left hand is the tip of a something called a _hookah _pipe, and that what he and his "friends" - he has a slight lisp on the "s" on the end of the word "friends," but no other time when he uses the letter "s," strange, Bourbon thinks, and yes the white-gloved man says this has always been my favorite of all my kingdom and when i am free of business to go about the earth, walking up and down upon it i choose this place and won't you please gather our food for us, we've traveled all a long distance and some of us are positively _famished_-

And before the Monsieur Bourbon knows it, he's gone into the kitchen and gotten silver plates and crystal goblets and silver place settings, and with perfect dignity, with a smile on his face, with delight, even, he's set the places for all of them, even for the strange garbage heap that is moving and should _be terrified by no no don't think about _and he's laughing and telling all of the strange guests who for the moment he is no longer terrifed by and even curious about his story, more about them than he even should, and as he ladles the soup and brings the veal and chicken and wine to them for two hours he feels closer to these strange guests than he ever has to anyone else i-i-in h-h-his entire life, and even though he cannot see their faces he can tell they are sympathizing with him, laughing at his jokes -

_hahahaha_

_HEWHEWHEWHEW_

_kkkaaaaklltkkaaaa akk akk aakk _

_kiii kiiii kiii kkiii kiii_

_oh oh oh ohhhhhhhh_

_kheh. keh. kheh. _

_a. a. a. a. a. a. a._

And all too soon. All too soon it's done and they've dismissed him, so politely. And they've been asked to be left alone. So they can talk.

The Dauphin looks down at what's been pushed down into his hand. It's a golden coin. Large one, too. "What the hell just happened?"


	5. Act V: With Hoops of Steel

"Hamlet."

"What did you say?"

"I said: Hamlet."

"And what does that mean?"

"Nothing... Everything!"

"But what is it?"

"Nobody... And yet, yes, it is somebody!"

"And what does the somebody do?"

"Spreads terror!"

It didn't help that they were both a little high. They'd smoked from the pipes they'd kept in the back. He had some trouble inhaling.

**SHAKE-SPARED: EVERYTHING GETS FIXED FOREVER.**

**ACT V: BREAKING UP IS BARD TO DO **

The man shifted in the fancy seat. They could have had a large number of servants to chaffeur them. That was the rage. The self-propelled steam carriage with driver. But being who they were, the man and his wife just had to do it themselves. Drive themselves. That was what they did. Always, metaphorically speaking, And literally speaking in this case.

"Good repose the while! Is that so?" said the woman next to him.

The white haired man with the bulbous nose bit his lip. "That depends on your definition of what 'is' is." He had gone silver early. Or too late, if you asked his competitors.

His bitter, bitter competition. If they had been there they would have had a few choice words to cluck at the feuding pair. And then they would have added in broken reedy voices to a man, _We're soooo olllld!_

"What in the name of the deity's beard of antiquity are you mouth-gating about?" she replied.

He expelled a breath before replying: "Mouth gate. No gate. Mouth. Why won't you call it what it is?"

"You never like any of my new wordvention."

"Wordvention is not a word. You know what is a word? Shame. Shame and marriage. Marriage is a friendship of sorts. Shame and marriage. These are words, and let me tell you the secret of friendjitsu. Those two words. They don't go together."

His voice was a little rough around the edges. He did a lot of talking to people.

She gave him a little condescending pat on the back. "The raven himself is hoarse. Your mouthgate is full of poison and raven secrets."

"..."

"... Raven lies." She whispered.

"Okay. _Raven lies_." He turned in his seat. "See. There's no ravens that lie. It's not in their skill set. No workshops. There's no seminars for them. No workshops in the mountains, no oral receivership of tradition. Right now, I can convince you today that there is no part of this world, or any world of which there could be ever a part of me where any of these things exist and do not fill me, me, your real actual, non-neologism, non-fake word human friend, with a curious case of total hatred towards you. The solution always is magical head blow friendship. Many tears. Manly tears. Note that down."

"Raven note." she said.

A brief silence.

"Raven note." she said.

He reached into the side pocket and got a stress rat carcass filled with sawdust. Nothing like sawdust, the smell and feel of it, to clear the head and the heart of wifen-stress. "You're still - that's just great."

"It is really great." she said.

He looked out the window, coughed. "Oh, Jesus. Wow. How mature. Yeah. I get it."

"Get it?"

"Yesterday is yesterday. If we try to recapture it, we will only lose tomorrow. And you're mad because friendjitsu is the only word that has ever caught on that I made it up."

Her smile got cruel. They both were famous, for different things. For instance, that look on her face was in the international book of universal signs. It was known in woodcut, bardic traveling standup comedy, imitations, verbal descriptions, by rumor and fireside tale, as the _here-comes-the-shiv-you-shouldn't-have-told-son _face.

Her lips parted and: "You know what and who Hamlet is. You have him tattooed on your body."

A long silence.

She snorted at him and turned to him in a sneer. "What, quite unmann'd in folly? It covers like your entire back."

A longer silence

"Whatever," she said. "I'm not a psychiapomp – I don't know all of the reasons behind your concern, some might say your obsession."

Her face whitened and his reddened.

A longest silence.

"I'm sorry, honey. I crossed the line."

Still silence from honey. No advancement on the honey front.

"Something wicked this way comes," she thought. "God, does he get into his tempers. But I _am _the lyrical gangster, murderer. So excuse me mister officer. _Still _love you like that."

"Hon, this is my final offer," she said aloud, finally. "C'mon. It's like I'm hungover with my mom again Christmas morning," she continued. He was from the South of their country, she from the North. They spoke English with different accents. One of those divides of speech and phrasing not always noticeable to foreign listeners. But they were there all the same.

"Do I have to be Li'l Sugar again?" she said in a cutesy voice, in a _perfect imitation _of a girl much younger than she was.

She kept the voice and went on talking: "I'm pushing all of seventeen, and after that's it's like a few months of experience before I get promoted to eighteen. I could even probably be eligible for the "real jail" parties my Dad always talks about in his letters to our home last, well, week."

He sighed, and shook his head.

Then he looked up and gave a smile, turning his face from the road to look at her with eyes that were bleary, slightly worse for wear. The man with the faraway eyes. She was put on guard for a reason. He was one of the best public speakers in the world.

"You know what? False face must hide what the false heart doth know. Yeah, I know who Hamlet is. I thought it would it be nice for us to do a little skit about him like we didn't know who he was. To pass the driving time, we would spend it in some words upon _that _business, _if _you would grant the time. Like we had a super mysterious princess or spy or werewolf in the back. Like we were silky sweet badasses from the middle ageded guilds."

The wheels went over a step bridge. A foolish thought, to say a sorry sight.

_Clunka-dunka-clunka dunk _went the wheels.

_Silence_, went the inside of the carriage.

Somewhere the woman heard the owl scream and the crickets cry. It was broad daylight.

The chronic had been forthcoming with revelations.

"Middle ... medieval mystery tours ... guilds ... guides," he said. He had gone to Oxford and was reminding himself of that now as he slipped and slided over the correct words like a blind beggar at a cake walk thrown by cruel children. "... Guidage. I meant ... we could be that, too."

She rolled her eyes. "We're on a wagon. God, do you listen to yourself?"

"Raven listen."

The hitting was over sooner than expected. _S/he's been working out_, they both thought. It was a veritable Scottish tragedy.

They were passing by a small village. Onlookers saw the red painted carriage rock back and forth for a good half-minute. On the side of the vehicle were two golden arches, and the letters of the fast food restaurant "MacBeth's" on the side.

The Lord MacBeth, President of the MacBeth's corporation and one of the most powerful men in the world, turned to his wife. The Lady MacBeth, recently Senator from Edinburgh and Chief Executive Officer of MacBeth's corporation and the richest woman in the world, turned to face him. They had a hundred quick-serving restaurants in every major city in Europe and most of the minor ones. They were on eternal campaign to open new ones. Seems like all the really were doing was waiting for love.

"Total silence," he said.

There was. They kept on driving.

"No need to be alone," the Lord told himself. "No need to be alone."

The Lady looked out over passing wheatfields. "It's real love," she thought to herself. "It's real. Yes, it's real love. It's real."


	6. Act VI: A Most Palpable Hit

Hamlet and Horatio have an interesting relationship. Horatio is the endurer of all things, in the end. But for Sweet Jesu's sake, Horatio has just about had it. All the training he's had, and he's still pretty much at breaking point. He does his best to keep it up and, really, who doesn't like a wild and crazy guy, but goddamn it, he has his limits and -

No, he thinks. We're only riding in this locked carriage until we get deposited back at Wittenburg Hall. He's a Prince, so the Watchmen are going to let the University handle this. Remember, it's all over as soon as we get back to the Quad. Horatio didn't want to ride in here but he's the Eternal Babysitter. And now he's with the Heir to the Danish Throne during his manic swing. Terrific. Just splendid.

Unfortunately, the wheels are going very slow. There's a great weight up top and the driver has been trying to interject a comment or two every half-hour, it seems. The poor guy must be taking the long way into town, just because he's enthralled, having a celebrity in his holding wagon.

It's a large, barrel-shaped deal. There are two long benches, one for each wall. Hamlet's on one, Horatio on the other. A door with bars and a heavy lock is all they can see of the outside world. Forgetting, of course, the sliding window up front. Horatio's pretty sure driver-man has a listening-hole, but that's hardly the thing you can prove and _the Prince is on the fairy-story bender again oh wait my turn to speak-_

"Milord," Horatio finally says, "this is nonsense."

"Listen, Horatio."

Horatio will not, in fact, listen: "No such book exists. No such book could exist. It would be one of Prospero's books if such a thing did exist."

"Imagine, if you will, a book in which you might write down the name of a man or woman and then they'd pass from this plane of existence! Just, whoosh! Vanish!" Hamlet makes a butterly shape with his hand, and then has it split apart just as soon.

"Vanish? Is this a book of mysterious disappearances? Are these unsolve mysteries, my Prince?"

"No. No, you're missing the point. They die - when you write down their name!"

A couple of notes on the wood-wall behind Horatio's head. He's not banging the back of his head with any particular rhythm, though. "Fine. But _logic _is occasionally a point worth considering. What if a man should write down the name, oh, Smith? Would that kill all the Smiths, in the world? The Smiths would be a sad lot, then. Such sad songs they would sing."

The driver's voice comes from the front. "Singin's a thing I got plenty of time t'do if yew gents is fancyin' a singalon-"

Both of them ignore the croak coming ahead and begin talking again at once.

Hamlet gets there first: "Well - this Death Book would take considerations for such an event! You'd have to be thinking of a proper Smith, you see. Not just any Smith. Because the Death Book takes a skilled user."

"And you'd be the one to use it, Hamlet?"

"Ah-haha! You just called me Hamlet!"

So I did, thinks Horatio, and for some reason, sits up in a crouched position on one of the two benches in the carriage. The act of being a disinterested, dispassionate observer is more and more stretched every day. "See, the madness of the Death Book is getting to you already. God knows what you would do with it."

"Be a god of a New World. Every girl's crazy for a sharp-death'd man."

"If you are a 'god' of this New World," Horatio says, and cracks his neck, "then, if the reports I have heard of that continent and its fecundity are correct, you shall be a lord over Incan pohtatohs. Yeah, if I am correct, and you would perhaps be Lord of Pohtatoes, if not Master of your own Sanity."

"Ah! Sanity claws at lesser people! It's a gift for lesser men! I'll import a load of those Pohtatohs to Elsinore. Fie, I'll take a Pohtatoh ship, and I'll eat it!"

That voice from the front again: "Ah'd never suspect yeh, yew bein' a typical student and whats-not."

Uhhh, Horatio thinks, and then jumps in with: "Would you eat a crocodile, milord? Wouldst thou drink edsel?"

"Vinegar, ewww."

"I would raise an army to fight you. I'd sneak up on you when you weren't expecting it."

"I'd watch my back," Hamlet replies, crossing his arms like a canary-filled cat.

"No, I am behind you!"

"No, it is I that am behind you!"

And somehow Hamlet has managed to do just that, even while Horatio had his eyes on him. He shuts his lids tight and tries not to think about the laws of physics too much.

Nobody understood Horatio's issues. Why are you so stressed, they should have asked him? Then he could have told them. Because, honestly, nothing should stress Horatio out.

If Horatio was a playing card, he would have been the Bad of Ass. He still is, but he has Hamlet to deal with.

People asked Horatio what Hamlet was like all of the time. The people who thought Horatio was just an onlooker in this life, a mere lucky impoverished pauper shacked-up in the same room with a mad prince - those people got the standard "Oh, he's much more normal than you think." And an anecdote. Then there'd be a subtle change of subject from Horatio or a pressing engagement he had to leave for right now.

Suite Ass also consisted of Wise, Jerk, Smart, and several other royal positions. Horatio played his hand as he liked.

To the few who knew what Horatio was, he could give them much more. Horatio had seen and worked with a lot of different dealers and wheelers and brokers of power. But in his many years at the high tables of Europe and Asia, he'd only been assigned to one other nobleman whom he respected: Prince Escalus of Verona, cousin to Mercutio.

When asked, he would contrast Hamlet and Escalus.

Escalus would set his mind to do something and find out how it could be done by researching it himself or getting his scholars to work it out. Getting the facts back, he would decide if was realistic, doable, and only then would he bring it before his council. He would treat every project in the same way.

"What if the project was dear to Escalus' heart?" they would ask Horatio.

Horatio would smile and say "Every project that man took up was dear to his heart. Even if it wasn't in the beginning, it became so."

If the wise men and women who helmed the city-state of Verona and by extension Verona's chunk of the Italy peninsula said it wouldn't fly, Escalus withdrew the idea. A prudent, moderate man who led a prudent, moderate, peaceful state.

He would finally say he was sorry they couldn't agree, but he understood.

Hamlet *never* understood. He refused. From Horatio's point of view, Hamlet began with a decisions and beat the world into accomodating them. "He'll bend the rules, buy or wheedle or terrify you, go above you, sweeten you, below you, change words, upend your perceptions, alter his sexual preference so that you're at the center of it, pick your pocket, change your mind."

"That sounds like a son-of-a-bitch," the person Horatio was talking to would say, hands trembling and reaching for the decanter.

Horatio would grab the bottle first and take a swing, wipe his mouth with the back of his hand and the end-part of his sleeve, put the decanter down, and say "But there's no meanness or cruelty to it. It's not that he hates or refuses the opposite idea. It just doesn't make sense to him. He really can't. Understand. It."

"What?" they'd say, now at last having their drink.

"You have to understand him, even if he won't understand you: he is always right."

"So he's that kind of asshole."

"No. Not in the sense that he always *thinks* he's right no matter what. Almost always, He literally somehow someway turns out to be correct in the long run."

That was the miracle of the thing: Hamlet acted by instinct, and was right. He was mad, but it was a madness which was a super-sanity all its own.

He was genius, a brain of the first order, a web-weaving intellect. What looked to others like confusion was a universe of order from the Hamletian perspective. An intellect so great that the Prince's perception of the world was warped and twisted ... but dead-on.

He told Hamlet this once. When they were drinking: "You never think, Hamlet. You only just act."

"Yeah. Where's the problem?" the Dane replied.

Horatio would explain that Escalus and men like him would connect two dots with a straight line.

Hamlet, on the other hand. would draw a series of long curling loops for a minute on the paper while people watching chuckled. Onlookers would stroke their beards and wink, knowing that the global pop superstardom of the Danish heir was a clever mask for a deranged rabies-mad royal who had avoided the nuthouse by virtue of his high birth.

If one of the audience were especially manipulative, maybe they'd pull out their planners and jot down: "Thursday - With what little wisdom the world is ruled. Plan trip to Denmark. Plot out ingratiation into royal family. Gain control of feeble-minded Price, and exploit him."

Then Hamlet would finish, stand up, laugh.

He would tell the man (it was usually a man) plotting the takeover of Denmark to stop writing, as he was found out. Then he'd slap him, occasionally kiss him, and tell the plotter why the plotter felt the need to manipulate other people, usually concluding with the phrase: "My, I'll bet you monsters lead interesting lives."

This is when the plotter usually started crying. Hamlet would give them a hug.

Then he'd turn around: "Ah, me public. I heard it all. Am I supposed to be a man, am I supposed to say it's okay? I don't mind? I don't mind. Well, I mind. I mind big-time." And only then would he point out that he'd been drawing ellipses and hyperbolas for fun the last sixty seconds. After all, the two points were already connected, and that's when Hamlet would whip out a mathematical demonstration he'd coincidentally discovered that morning, proving a sixth-dimensional bridge had come into existence at the moment the question had been asked to him.

Or maybe it was all an act. Maybe Hamlet was a master plotter so advanced that he had made careful decisions and precise movements look like chance impulses. Or maybe he really was crazy, and had the world's best luck.

Horatio acts like a normal being around Hamlet. He's not sure if it's because he genuinely likes the Prince and the Prince would be scared about what he really was; OR that he _is _normal compared to Hamlet. Or, that he really is a badass, but surviving around Hamlet's reality-distorting field takes up so much of his skill and concentration that what's left over to him makes it look like he's barely hanging on by his fingernails. Probably some kind of combination of all three.

And yet ... Horatio's coming around to the "Hamlet is just an asshole" school of thought. It took a while, but he's about down to ground zero.

It's been - how long has it been? He has known the Prince for 1085 days. Or 2 years, 11 months, 20 days. Horatio's life has a pretty typical pattern to it now. The Prince runs around wherever, just for fun. He does this a lot. Horatio locks him down whenever, and that's how Hamlet's caught. But the Dane breaks loose, and then you vamoose and now you know the plot." Horatio realizes to his horror he just said the last several sentences out loud. What's even scarier is that he just doesn't care. Just. Can't. Won't. Sick to death of it.

Hamlet's unfazed. "Sounds pretty accurate to me." Danish-sized grin. "Ready to escape?"

Horatio rolls his eyes. "Hamlet -"

"Again!"

"I'm tired and sick enough of titles, you grinning jackanape."

** ACT VI: ADMIT IMPEDIMENTS**

Horatio just doesn't care. He's tired and his self-discipline is worn down at the moment. "I've removed all the lockpicks from your person. Yes, the other night. So you can stop looking so goddamn cheerful all of the time, good friend. Splitting heirs won't do in this situation. We're stuck here for the night. At least you are." He really can't believe he just said that, tries to think of some mending action-

Hamlet's unfazed. "I found the lockpicks you stole. The bloom was the key."

"You haven't the foggiest-"

"Oh, but I have the foggiest! The box inside the flowerpot."

Horatio's turn to be smug. "Which was replaced with a duplicate key made from this one."

"Which then was replaced with another."

"Are you quite certain, sweet Prince?"

Hamlet shifts in his seat. "...No. Horatio. I am certain, however, that those keys were set up by me as a prank several months ago that I didn't follow up on."

"The loose wire?"

"A feint. Already taken."

Horatio bangs the lock with his fist. "Immaterial. Those picks are for the fine doorlocks of scholar-rooms, not for the heavy death-rattles of carriages like this one."

They sit across from each other, in silence.

"It's hard for me to do this," says Hamlet, a minute later. "Friendship."

Horatio's looking out the window. "You've got every friend in the world, superstar."

A moment later, he adds, "This'll be in the papers. One more crazy score for the beloved Prince of Denmark."

Hamlet stands on the wall bench and begins pressing his arm-strength against the ceiling, to see if it'll hold or something. "Papers will be in the papers. Crazy? Nah ha ha, crazy like a fox. Like a Danish fox. A fox in a box now. Foxes have boxes, and voles have holes, but the son of the King hath nowhere to lay his head."

And then: "Not like you think," in that whisper-voice he does. Not creepy this time, just a little quiet.

Horatio's eyes dart to his face. "What?"

"Friendship. I'm learning. It's new. But it's not like you think, with me."

"Boo-hoo," says Horatio, and means it. He stretches out his full length on the long bench, closing his eyes. "You have friends. You're the most famous man in Europe. Children, hermits, and the high-functioning sort of sheepdog know you *who* are. There's no middling with you. You have two extremities, long summers and brief winters and ne'er any autumn or spring spent between them. But summer can weary the most heat-hungering vine."

He opens his eyes, though, and Hamlet's face fills his view. "Through you," the Prince says, "Only since you. It's fun." He does the grin again. "Fun is fun."

Horatio growls. "We have to talk about this."

"About what?"

"This," Horatio says, and sits up. "Do you think about anything before running into it? I include everything you do in there. Confession of friendship, too."

"I have trust. I trust in you. Trust is friendship. You taught me that." The Prince sits down on the bench next to him. It's awkward for Horatio. He's like a little boy, genius, serial killer all rolled up into one. Jesus, how did I end up in a carriage like this next to a man like this?

"My. Lord. You do not mix water and wine but without a care in the world mash one metaphor into the other all day long!"

Hamlet's still sitting there, looking eagerly at him. Horatio's mouth tightens. The Prince of Denmark looks so fragile, a breath would break him.

The Prince whispers to Horatio. "I am fortune's fool."

Horatio closes his eyes again. He realized what he'd seen in the Prince's eyes. An alien, terrifying thing.

Sincerity.

* * *

_Now, it's a cliche that when you look at all the text, all the reports, essays, and opinions, there is on the sixteen-year-old Prince of Denmark, you come away with a different Hamlet. Everybody has a different Hamlet. There are literally millions of possible Hamlets. It drove the best analytic and speculative minds of the ruling houses of Europe crazy. _

_These persons, however, were not Horatio. By the time he became roommate to the Heir to the Danish Crown, Horatio had compiled action plans and gambits on every kind of Hamlet he expected to find. From a year of research, he had narrowed down the possibilities. _

_He had subjected them to a rigorous statistical review. It was a system he'd designed himself. Indecisive overintellectual had been the most likely personality, coming in, according to Horatio's probability set, at 45%. Spoiled heir celebrisimpleton, 20% likelihood. Harmless lovable buffoon, estimation 30%. Nice guy with Oedipal issues was the smallest possibility, only 5%._

_Then the first night of their friendship Horatio saw Hamlet slide a dull-pointed dagger into the space in between his eyeball and socket. _

_Horatio is now pretty sure it was a dream. Hamlet also used to own an opium pipe, and they did smoke it that very first night of their acquaintance. The Prince ... insisted. Horatio "hid" it the next day, in several pieces, in the river. _

_For a dream, it still told him a lot about the kind of strange night terrors the man could inspire ..._

_Horatio opened his eyes. Oh, still night. They were still in their room ... there was that dagger ... _

_"Merry, it will go best, bedfellow, if your quick hand shall catch my tears," Hamlet giggled, and began singing a song of only vowels he'd written that afternoon. Backwards. _

_Horatio gagged, and began mumbling words that he thought a normal teenage kid would say, all while holding a small beaker under the Prince's cheek. Then the son of the most powerful royal house in the world, who Horatio had imagined talking in OldSpeak even when he went to the privy, turned to to him and said, in perfect NewSpeech: _

_"This is going to be a __**very fucking big deal **__for the science of Opticks." Hamlet took his hand off the dagger, leaving it in there. He smiled. "So when did you kill your first man?" _

_"M-my ... my lord?"_

_"No lords here. Hamlet." He fiddled with the blade coming from his eyesocket. The tender white ball was rapidly going red from irritation. Man, this is great! All my thoughts be bloody. And how could they not be? Sharing a room with you, soldier. Be plain with me." _

_The Prince sucked in a sharp breath. There were shark teeth in his look, and a shark's mouth in his wide smile. The shadows danced in the angles of his face. "'For. Tis. Sport. To have. The engineer. Hoisted. By his own. Work."_

_"... the ... engineer?" _

_Horatio's heart all of a sudden began to sound in his ears. His vision narrowed. Time stretched out. The usual emotional control that came from his years of training had disappeared. __**Oh, mother of God **__... _

_"Come now. With truth, you are no truant," The Prince hissed, his voice soft. His lips parted and his tongue ran over his very white teeth. "You may try to out-Herod Herod but 'tis a capital crime to adder me thus. I'll take the unspoken testimony of your too solid flesh for a thousand pound. For the scar on your right hand between index and thumb. Only a dagger is so sharp. And to speak of scars, the most lamentable tragedy of your back."_

_Horatio's breath stopped. He felt very certain that he shouldn't move an inch. He felt his jaw tighten. _

_Hamlet wasn't even looking at him. He was pursuing a peach that had rolled under the bunkbed, and finally fetched it. Holding it up to the light, he began to press his hands into the fruit's soft skin. "Aye! when you switched shirts before dinner. How does a diplomat's son so-called get so many whips and scorns, and travels with a rapier which cannot be but two years new, yet has war's small notches on it? Yes, I noticed. Despite the job you did to hide it."_

_Those dark eyes kept staring. The secret was not far away from the surface now. _

_"How can it be explained, this supposedly too-soft son of an ambassador who can catch a pen falling from the table faster than I can blink? Yea, who makes a show of blanching at a dagger he sees before him, but ne'er winced when he saw ravens picking at the faces of the poor and plague-stricken dead outside of town?"_

_This was something he hadn't prepared for. _

_The single lamp lit in the corner contained a candle. _

_The wick's flame danced, the burn of it tossing warped and flickering shadows like living ink on the wall. _

_The last of the peach flesh ran in sodden wet lumps down the Prince's arm. _

_Horatio swallowed. A lump in his throat. From somewhere, he could swear, came the sound of mighty wings ... _

_Hamlet grinned again. It wasn't a mean grin, or a clever grin. Just an ordinary grin. Putting his hand back on the dagger-handle, he wiggled it in a little deeper. The tears were really pouring out now. "The hell is that smell? Is this a burn ward? Ha, ha, ha."_

_It was all the commoner opposite him could do to croak out "Burn ... ward?"_

_"Yes," Hamlet went on, "I was just saying, I have too many debts with the Autumn Court of the Dancing Masters to pay off. Old Warmaster and his Voodoo's gotta eat. I think you call it ... vengeance? Pay for pay, you understand. It's a doozy, alright. Let the Erlking explain it to you." He turned and gestured helpfully at one of the moving shadows on the wall. _

_A long wait followed. _

_"What ... do you want. From me?" Horatio finally said out loud. In a high pitched voice. _

_He wasn't trying to pretend anymore. _

_Fear. _

_Just fear. _

_No joking. Nothing else, now. _

_Hamlet slid the dagger out of his eye. The dull wet point shone in the dim light, a metal pen dewed with strange ink. He dropped it on the floor. _

_Clank._

_The Prince bent his head down. "It's about sending a message, Horatio." He looked up with one functional eye, the other swelled shut. He pointed to his forehead with another knife, a far sharper one, a tiny one, that he'd just pulled out of his jacket. "One day I'll need to hear the story of your wounds." _

_He clicked his tongue. "Do you want to know how I got this scar?" _

_"Scar?" _

_With that, Hamlet jammed the tip of the new knife into the middle of his forehead. As the blood began to trickle down, he gave a sad smile. "Yes, well ... I want to look good with my shirt off." He paused. "My bottom shirt." _

_He began to laugh again. _

_Really, it was his guilty conscience talking to him. Probably. _

_Horatio didn't remember what happened next. Had he passed out? Was he too scared to recall? Had he been drugged by the Prince? Was the entire thing a mad dream? It mattered naught. For when he woke up the next morning in his bed, Hamlet was gone to class, and there were no bloody sheets, no beaker, no peach remains, nothing. When he saw the Prince at lunchtime, Young Hamlet had a bandage where he had theoretically stabbed his head the night before. _

_Horatio was very good at telling when people were lying. When the topic of the previous night was brought up, Hamlet gave him a quizzical look, a legitimate one. "I fell out of bed this morning, as a dunce does," he explained. The Prince was not playacting. _

_When Horatio told him an edited version of their conversation the night before, Hamlet laughed, and told his new roommate that he had the greatest of imaginations. Neither his features, nor his voice, nor his words, showed him to be a liar. With that out of the way, Hamlet then began to tell Horatio in cryptic phrases his plans for the next week. _

_"Do you know what fireworks are made of, friend?" asked the Prince, innocent as a sober nun. _

After that first strange night, the man Horatio had lived with, even when drunk or at the height of his mania, had been crazy awesome, never creepy awesome. But crazy awesome is not always fun to live with. Well, maybe for other people. Or even most other people. But Horatio isn't most people.

Since that day, Horatio had been less and less an agent, and found himself a caretaker. He had expected to be intimidated, seduced, angered, bored, excluded, at worst killed. What he had not imagined was finding himself sane and normal by comparison. Or ... protective.

Horatio keeps odd hours. Not needing much sleep will do that to you. He had shaved his time down to four hours when he was sixteen. Horatio is eighteen now. It says so on a sheet of paper locked in a chest in a locked room in Paris. Every other document on that exists on Horatio reports his age as sixteen, and it's what Horatio tells people in conversation.

There are lots of things Horatio doesn't tell people.

One of the little games he plays with himself, one of the conundrums that his trained, efficient mind can never resolve is: just how smart is Hamlet? How much of him is in the world?

When he first was assigned to the Prince of Denmark two years ago, Horatio didn't know what to expect. He had his mission. He had the tools, and he had the talent. Then he spent an evening with Hamlet.

It is worth noting that Horatio does not scare easily. There are no jinkies that shock him from belief.

He's seen a lot, after all. Horatio has no last name. His papers of identity, on file at the university, list him a Horatio Mann, but that's more of a joke between him and his handlers. He has a thousand shifting dodges. To the people that assigned him to Hamlet, he's referred to variously as "Argus" or "Sentinel." To a woman in Prague who he can trust, he's "the Warden." To a guy in Kentucky, he'd be Mr. Unlucky. The real givers of names, however, are the spymasters of the world who like to invent handles for him every time they get sloshed and tell stories of the Great Spy. There's a favorite handle for him in every royal house. "Did you hear what the Snoop did?" "The guy who got to him was the Investigator." "Searcher says it's going to be big." "We have the Onlooker giving us that line." Then there are the people who've actually had to deal with him face-to-face; those who have fought him, shared a bed with him, gone on assignment with him. The badasses, the double and triple spies, the mercs, the grifters and shifters and brawlers. When you're talking about someone and you don't use a proper name - when you mention the Spectator, Beholder, the Watchman or the Roundsman; when you bring up the Gazer or the Scout, the Viewer, the Spotter, the Lookout or the Man Who Turns Up - it's generally understood Horatio is the subject. Another funny thing: Horatio doesn't accumulate name like "Asskicker" or "Widowmaker," even though he's done both. Those names never seem to fit him. He thinks of himself as an Agent, an Operative. He can never write an autobiography, of course, but if he did, he'd title it "The Inside Man."

Horatio has met many human beings, half of them men. And most men, as a great poet once wrote, believe that under the right circumstances they could be the biggest badass on earth. With training from hell, with the right motivation, with the correct amount of resources behind me, with some mix of superior technology, wealth, power ... I could be the end-all be-all toughest motherfucker of all time.

And some of these guys decide to make the dream come true. They spend years on martial arts skills, fencing, building tolerance to pain. They build up resistance to iocaine powders and buy long coats, seek out alchemists to bond powerful metals to their skins or search for dread pirates who are looking for successors.

Eventually a few of these men become the strongest, meanest hombres in their neighborhood, their city, their country, and maybe on their continent. They believe that they are the best at what they do. The fortunate but deluded majority of them have spent out their lives holding this belief - and who can blame them? - imagining themselves the peak of human development until their dying day.

Then there are the sadder but wiser badasses. These unfortunate men have lived lives identical to the fools described above, with one important difference:

They have met Horatio.

He is the man on which such illusions break.

* * *

Such an illusion is breaking now.

"Horatio," Hamlet says.

He takes in a breath.

"My lord?"

The man in black has walked over to the window in the wagon and is staring out of it. His back is to Horatio. The Prince is breathing heavily. He tries to phrase OldSpeak properly. "Since ... since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, and, and ... could of men distinguish, her election hath seal'd ... thee ... for herself; for thou hast ... hast been-"

He stops, can't speak.

Starts again. "Give ... Give me that man that is not passion's slave, and I ..."

Horatio stands.

"... I will wear him in my heart's core, ay ... in my heart of heart ..."

And Hamlet falls silent. Both of his hands are on the window's bars now. His head drops down. For a second, he looks so tired. So very, very tired.

"Horatio," Hamlet says. "You're the first real friend I've ever had. You have to believe in me. Nobody else knows me. Not really. You're it. You're the only one. I know it is not always easy to ... like me. There are calms, and there are storms, and sometimes I don't know if I am north by northwest. I put on an antic disposition on, and sometimes it puts me on. I ... there is method to the madness, but method I cannot explain. All I can ever ask for is patience, and trust. Even this is too long."

A hand comes down on Hamlet's forearm. Horatio stands there. Hamlet's never seen a person look so happy and sad at the same time.

"You are my friend, Hamlet."

"And I, yours."

And now it's Horatio grinning. It's something ... new.

There's a serious danger of this becoming a scene of manly tears and while that would be good for bonding, Horatio is about five minutes away from full confession mode and he's not the most emotionally available man on the planet in the best of times. So why not help Hamlet escape?

For some reason Horatio doesn't mind. Hm, he thinks, what would the Mad Prince say?

Ah. Horatio clamps his hand down on the Prince's shoulder. "Let's blow this thing wide open like a donkey full of tummy-presents."

"Fucking wagons, how do they work?" replies Hamlet.

Horatio's grin goes even a little bit wider. Hamlet is beginning to grasp, perhaps, a little of why people are _do not have normal pulse rate around him. _

"They topple over like anything else in the world," Horatio replies, "especially if they have a Falstaff roped to the top of them." They both look up to the ceiling, where they are suddenly aware of a loud wood-sawing sound made by the sleeping emperor of big-ass lies.

Hamlet's eyebrow, left one, goes up a bit. "Horatio, are you feinting?"

Horatio smiles. "No. Look me in the eye."

He means it.

"Application of force?"

"Necessary. Axis of-"

"Forty-five degrees."

"Forty-seven," Horatio corrects.

"Done."

"You're insane."

"You're a liar."

"Embroiderer."

"Old women embroider," Hamlet smile hisses - smisses - as he stands up on one wall-bench of the carriage.

Horatio has taken up the other. "Speaking of which: how is your mother?"

"Well, say hello to her for me, would you?" The two begin to sway back and forth, leaning their weight to one side, then another.

"Lovely woman."

"The best."

Which is just about the moment that the MacBeth chariot runs headlong into the carraige.

All lights out.


End file.
